Travels with Samantha

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"This book is about the summer I spent seeing North America, meeting
North Americans, and trying to figure out how people live," writes
Greenspun after losing his companion. You'll come face to face with
examples of the stunning ethnic, scenic, and cultural richness of the
continent.

Meet both sides of the language war in Montreal, bored youths in the
Midwest, North Dakota Harley riders, struggling single mothers in the
Yukon, and free spirits in Alaska. Join Greenspun as he travels up
the spine of the Rocky Mountains into Canada and then up the Alaska
Highway. Splash down in a float plane and spend a week with 20 bears.

Work your way through the Inside Passage on the Alaska Marine Highway,
and get inside a salmon processing factory. See if Greenspun survives
touring Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and the Pacific Northwest with old
friends and new. Ask about polygamy in Salt Lake City, mountain bike
the Slickrock Trail, and learn how to live with AIDS in Utah. Watch
the waters recede from the Great Flood of '93 in St. Louis.
Follow Greenspun back to Boston and MIT.

Readers and subjects alike praise Travels with Samantha

"You make me sound like a world-class caustic nympho bitch."

Jennifer M. (Boulder, Colorado)

"I'm a member of GOSA, the Geyser
Observation and Study Association. I found that you seem to have
investigated roughly five times as many attractive women as geysers
while you were in Yellowstone. To each his own. If you hadn't seen
Echinus at midnight, though, I would have been sure you were purely
a poseur. Not one word about Grand, about Castle, the Lion Group,
the difficulty of catching Beehive, the maniacally explosive madness
that is Fan & Mortar, the isolated ocean of Artemisia...did
you see nothing of any of these?

How can you say you saw America? If you saw as little of the rest
of America as you have written about the geysers of Yellowstone, you
saw nothing."

Mike O'Brien (Venice Beach, California)

It would be nice if modesty prevented me from mentioning that
Travels with Samantha won a Best of the Web '94
award.

"What is a good argument, What might be called a good description,
What is style? Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to these
questions. However, sometimes I know for sure that something is
neither a good argument, nor a good description and has definitely
no style."